Presenting the "other" side of academic physics, where people
backstab and give lousy talks. Where people are sometimes lazy
or incompetent, and the best don't get the credit or the job.
From the perspective of someone lucky enough to have landed a
tenure-track professorship.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Human Exploration at the cost of science

It's funny how so often in the media you find instances of "what does Stephen Hawking say" always about something not related to his areas of expertise, say, something like, "Women who are able should definitely breastfeed."

Anyway, in this instance, it's Slashdot with a story saying that Hawking thinks mankind has to spread to other orbs to hedge its bets against nuclear war, pandemic, or something I've not heard of before called "sudden global warming." I'm sure Lubos is going to jump all over that one. Let's see if I can predict his behavior as well as Woit can.

And Nasa is doing so well financially, I'm sure 20 years is plenty to have a base on the moon. Oh wait, Hawking isn't American, maybe ESA can do the human exploration and leave NASA to do science?